Er, yes, this time I'm pretty sure I did it right. Like I said, I actually managed to get some jpgs, that were in the good file pattern "Artist - (Year) Album", so no problem about that... but I only got 6 out of the 21 expected !!!

I would have thought that I did something wrong if I I hadn't got any artwork at all... but 6 out of 21, I guess there might be a small bug or something... well, I don't know... what do you think ?

Maybe I can email you some of my 8 Kbps MP3 so that you can see for yourself ?

I surely would... if I had your email !! In fact I have tried to send the files to mcored@users.sourceforge.net, with no success. Error : "message size 4060224 exceeds size limit 1048576 of server mail.sourceforge.net"If you have a regular email address where I can send you 4MB...

On a more general note, I never understood the fascination with ratings. Ratings are subjective, and only ever valid for one person - the rater, eg. myself. I already know what I like. I can look at any given song in my playlist and tell you whether I like it or not, without a rating tag.

True, and I've thought of this several times. Still you could create a rating for yourself and the one you might be living with, and create powerful playlists that fits both of yours taste in music.

QUOTE (JensRex @ Mar 11 2007, 02:38)

Other than that, why would I keep music in my playlist that I don't like? If I were to rate a song 'zero' because I hate it, I might as well just delete it.

I like to keep complete albums in my library, even if there's several songs i dislike. Also sometimes a track fits an album well even if it's not so great at all.

I'm going to retry as soon as I can (right now my girlfriend is playing on the PC... damn !! ). I don't understand how I could get only 6 jpgs last time with the same options set... I'll keep you informed in a few hours.

Hey, just FYI : do you want to know why the iTMS missed 4 tracks ? In one of them the artist is "The Black Eyed Peas"... but the iTMS does only know "Black Eyed Peas" without the article ! (funny, I thought the iTMS guys were smart enough to skip the articles when browsing for artwork). And in the 3 others, if I remember well the album name is preceded by "[Single]", so I guess it's normal.

I've simply restarted iTunes, then iTSfv. Then I've clicked on "Validate selected tracks", with NO MODIFICATION in the prefs since the last time... and now it WORKS !!! I get 21 jpgs with all the right file names !!!

Not only have you come up with a great little piece of software. That alone could be enough for most people. But not for you.

You are most kind, responsive to people's questions (even the weird ones) and requests (yeah, even the weird ones too ). You take people's ideas into consideration to improve your already great software, and you come up with new betas in a matter of hours !

You (and odyssey too of course ! ) have just helped me to begin recovering/converting quality iTMS artwork that I was longing for since the beginning of the year. I knew that patience would pay. I knew that I wouldn't need to scan all my 1000 original CD booklets. I knew that I could get better than 300x300 AMG or mid-quality Amazon artwork. And when odyssey helped me to reconsider all the iTMS thing, then I knew that someday, somebody would find a way to make all the artwork go automatically, once and for all, into my hundreds of album folders, with just a single mouse click.

You have just done that for me, and for that you deserve my total appreciation and respect.

You have been a great user and giving very informative/clear and precise feedback that made the enhancements even more enjoyable. So really appreciate that too.

I just made build 5.6.3.0 public in SF.net.

Version 5.06 - 200700908?

5.6.3.0 iTSfv will not allow synchrocleaning if iTunes music folder path is not set to location of most of the tracks are [Jonnno]5.6.2.0 Ability to change Album Browser view without having to revalidate 5.6.1.3 Disabled modifying Album Browser modes while adding tracks to Album Browser5.6.1.2 DiscCount was wrong for album names shared by different artists [ffs revalidation of entire iTunes music library is recommended]5.6.1.1 During validation of last 100 tracks, DiscCount will not be overwritten for incomplete albums5.6.1.0 iTMS Artwork can now be imported without the presence of artwork saved in the file system5.6.0.1 Crashed during loading tracks data if album tag was empty [Chris]

Next time iTSfv loads, by default it will prompt to download the update.

However, the function takes other arguments such as user weighting to tune the rating system for their preferences e.g. if you dislike the idea of using skippedCount you can put a weight of 0% for that. It also takes the maximum playedCount for comparison.

OK, iTSfv works beautifully well. But of course, the iTMS doesn't have 100% of the needed artwork. Using other softwares, I've been able to recover additional artwork from Amazon & co., and to put it next to my FLAC/mp3 files.

Now my question is : could iTSfv automatically assign this new artwork to all the relevant iTunes tracks, eliminating the need to to it manually ?

I don't know if iTSfv already does it, but here's how it could work :- iTSfv looks for all the selected files that don't have artwork,- iTSfv checks the corresponding folders to see if there's already some jpg artwork,- If there is, then iTSfv just tells iTunes to append it to the relevant files.

Could iTSfv automatically assign this new artwork to all the relevant iTunes tracks, eliminating the need to to it manually? Since iTunes 7 the Artwork is not saved directly to the file when you get Artwork via iTunes, so this was a real pain-ita for me.

If I understand correctly, you are asking if iTSfv will embed these new artwork into the tracks itself automatically so you don't have to do it manually? If then YES! That's like the first need for making this application and everything else was built around it.

You just have to enable Import Artwork to track from Artwork.jpg in Validate > Tracks which is enabled by default.

Regarding my question, I was not asking iTSfv to embed the artwork *into* the tracks themselves, but rather to tell iTunes to generate iTunes-style .itc files in the iTunes artwork folders.

In other words, that's exactly what iTunes 7.x would do if you selected "info" on one particular track, then "picture", then "add a picture", then you look for the picture on your hard drive, then "OK". The picture will not be embedded into the track, but iTunes will create the .itc and link it with the track. I hope I'm clear enough.

If I understand well, right now iTSfv does only embed the artwork *into* the tracks. Maybe it could be good to have the choice, eventually.

In other words, that's exactly what iTunes 7.x would do if you selected "info" on one particular track, then "picture", then "add a picture", then you look for the picture on your hard drive, then "OK". The picture will not be embedded into the track

Stop right there, Jose, when you add a picture manually, iTunes embeds the picture to *into* the file -- into the file that you did Get Info and added the picture. iTunes will also create an .itc file so that other tracks can access that.

Speaking of generating .itc files, it is certainly doable once the ITC specification is released by Apple. I had a look into there, there have been number of hacking attempts to figure out a spec by enthusiasts. However, I still don't understand why exactly we would need an add-on to create the ITC files if iTunes can do it by itself?

So basically what you are looking for is, adding artwork to one file, logically the first track of the album, so the rest of the tracks can access the artwork via the ITC file created.

Stop right there, Jose, when you add a picture manually, iTunes embeds the picture to *into* the file -- into the file that you did Get Info and added the picture. iTunes will also create an .itc file so that other tracks can access that.

I thought that since iTunes 7, iTunes did no longer embed the pics into the files ! I'm sure that I have read that since iTunes 7, iTunes only handles .itc files...

QUOTE (~*McoreD*~ @ Sep 5 2007, 09:13)

Speaking of generating .itc files, it is certainly doable once the ITC specification is released by Apple. I had a look into there, there have been number of hacking attempts to figure out a spec by enthusiasts.

I don't understand : you are able to take an .itc and convert it to .jpg, but not the opposite ?

QUOTE (~*McoreD*~ @ Sep 5 2007, 09:13)

However, I still don't understand why exactly we would need an add-on to create the ITC files if iTunes can do it by itself?

I was just thinking of iTSfv telling iTunes to do it by itself for all the selected tracks, nothing more.

QUOTE (~*McoreD*~ @ Sep 5 2007, 09:13)

So basically what you are looking for is, adding artwork to one file, logically the first track of the album, so the rest of the tracks can access the artwork via the ITC file created.

Um, yes, you can say that. What I'm looking for is, making iTunes convert the .jpg to .itc, then linking the .itc to all the tracks with the same artist and the same album. But if it's too complicated, don't bother with that.

iTSfv doesn't save Artwork to file that way - converting .itc to .jpg.

iTunes indeed embeds the artwork to track if you manually add the artwork. The only time it doesn't embed is when it gets the Artwork automatically.

The iTunes SDK allows us to save the artwork to file, directly from embedded tracks or tracks that have the iTunes Store artwork. So that process was fairly simple. While conversion of iTC to JPG is certainly possible without depending on iTunes SDK, I didn't do it that way because 1/ it is not a 100% reliable way to do it 2/ using iTunes SDK is much more simple.

I am aware that people are attempting to find ways to inject .itc files using artwork out side of iTMS but I think the whole process is still under R&D.

Latest version 5.7.2 seems to be working. it read the entire itunes library, but then it got stuck in one album and the progress bar didn't move. No error reports.

I have tried several times. It gets stuck in exactly the same album (vangelis - masks).

Just a quick question.The installer talks about a manual, but there's no pdf in the install directory. Are you working on that, or did I get a damaged distribution package that comes with no manual (got it from sourceforge)?

A few questions cause I do not seem to get the program and what each feature does and I do not have a lot of time, these are somewhat itunes questions too, but you guys seem to know what you are doing.

First of all a weird bug: I did the scan and fix and capitalize the first letters and it decapitalized the artists… but did capitalize other stuff… wuppps. Took a while to fix cause I didn’t test first…

Here are my questions:1. Some albums of mine do not have track numbers in the mp3 tag. Some way of guessing them of just assigning them from 1 to x automatically depending on how it is listed in the playlist (should mostly be correct)2. Cover Flow artwork. I cleaned all my mp3 of embedded artwork and downloaded album covers using itunes. There are plenty of artists without album artwork (radiohead even? And tool?) and I was wondering what happens if I do embed artwork into the id3 heards. I hate bad quality album art but if I drag a 300x300 jpg into the artwork my mp3 sizes will increase dramatically I presume? Is there some way to add cover flow only artwork from external sources into itunes?3. For some reason even the songs with Cover Flow artwork from itunes store do not always have a thumbnail artwork on my ipod, even though I can view the full screen artwork fine?!4. ID header versions…. Sight. Itunes does 2.4. however I think 2.3 might be more compatible with most other mp3 headers and windows? Which version of header should I use? I added some new albums and they did not have any id3 info in itunes however wmp sees them and another tagging program does?5. Lyrics: yes or no? how much kb does it add to an mp3 and do you guys use it.6. what can itsfv do? Is there some manual?